


The Kind of Eyes that Drive Wolves Mad

by truethingsproved



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Lavender Brown is here to kiss girls and destroy Fenrir Greyback c:, Revenge, revengefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-10
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-02-08 06:02:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1929417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/truethingsproved/pseuds/truethingsproved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fenrir Greyback is in London again. She knows this because she pays attention, because she listens to whispers and reads between the lines in newspapers. No one's seen her for two years--no one who remembers her as Lavender Brown, at least. In Lyon she was Camille Delacorte; in Dresden she was Madgalena Burkhardt; in Bucharest she was Anastazja Kusmenova. But here, in London again, she is Lavender Brown, and she wears her true name like she wears the scars on her throat: with pride, accompanied by sharp claws and sharper teeth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kind of Eyes that Drive Wolves Mad

**Author's Note:**

> heads up, lovelies--discussion of harassment, assault, and violence ahead!

London isn't the same anymore.

Maybe it's because now she can smell the filth and pollution in the air, the rancid stench of sweat and breath from eight million people moving in sync, the rotting flesh of discarded fruit tossed on the train tracks. Maybe it's because now she can see every movement that every man makes, every time his eyes linger too long on some poor girl who just wants to get home.

(There was a time when she believed that the world was generally good. Then, she got her throat ripped out and woke up covered in her own blood, the last breathing person on a battlefield surrounded by corpses.)

Fenrir Greyback is in London again. She knows this because she pays attention, because she listens to whispers and reads between the lines in newspapers. No one's seen her for two years--no one who remembers her as Lavender Brown, at least. In Lyon she was Camille Delacorte; in Dresden she was Madgalena Burkhardt; in Bucharest she was Anastazja Cuzminoz. But here, in London again, she is Lavender Brown, and she wears her true name like she wears the scars on her throat: with pride, accompanied by sharp claws and sharper teeth.

Fenrir Greyback is in London again and so is Lavender Brown.

The man on the other end of the aisle tries to put his hands on the girl standing next to him and Lavender snarls, drawing her teeth back and shaking her hair away from the knotted scar tissue along her neck. Her eyes flash gold and her lips bleed from where her too-long teeth break the skin and the man falls back against the doors of the train, looking afraid. The girl gets off at the next stop, untouched, unharmed, and Lavender lowers her head again, returning her attention to the Austen novel in her hands. The man doesn't move until she stands at her stop.

"You put your hands on a woman without her permission again," she warns him, loud enough that the other passengers can hear, "I'll break them. Do you understand me?"

He nods and she pats his cheek patronizingly before stepping out of the train and onto the platform. She turns to watch him as the doors slide closed and she hopes he remembers her face the next time he thinks he should grab a girl on the train.

More importantly, she hopes he remembers her teeth.

Lavender tucks her copy of  _Mansfield Park_  under her jacket and pulls her hood up, zipping the jacket closed and shoving her hands into her pockets. She can smell the rain.

\------

It's been two years since she's seen Parvati, too. It wasn't that she wanted to spend so much time away from the woman she loved most--on the contrary, there was nothing and no one that Lavender wanted more than the love of her life those first treacherous full moons, when her spine bowed back and her bones cracked and she howled in agony, chained up in a cellar outside of Roslavl, where she was just Irina.

But wolves, she's learned, are dangerous creatures, and they search out what's familiar to them when they are the most afraid. There are things that Lavender has done these two years that she would give everything to take back, more blood on her hands than she wants to imagine, but of all those things she couldn't live with herself if she hurt Parvati.

She's written letters, one every week since she left, detailing everything that she's been through, all the aliases and the time spent working as a waitress in Moscow, traveling through Ukraine hiding in the back of a truck, the blissful week she spent in Santorini purely by chance, the month she tried to go without changing by staying in Finland's summer sun, the kind that didn't set for three months, and the agony that followed.

She's written more than a hundred letters and she has thought of sending them all, but she never did, afraid of what Parvati would think when she read the familiar, if shaky, handwriting, afraid to be found, afraid to come home. They were the only things she carried with her without fail.

Now, she binds them together by month, labeled carefully and tied with ribbon, and she leaves them in a box at Parvati's door in the dusky hours of evening. She knocks until she hears footfalls approaching the door, and she hides when a familiar head of raven-black hair pokes out of the door and familiar brown hands collect the box curiously.

Lavender stands there all night, waiting until the light from Parvati's window goes out around two that morning and the aching in her chest fades away.

 _When I come back,_  she promises the darkened windows,  _I will kiss you like I should have kissed you every day these past two years._

She tips her head back and lets out a long sigh, the worn copy of  _Mansfield Park_  still under her arm. It's a full moon tomorrow night. Her bones rattle and her muscles sing at the promise of the change.

She boards her train to York that morning at six and she falls asleep in the woods around three that afternoon and by moonrise she is howling again.

\------

Greyback takes his tea black in the mornings and Lavender crosses her legs as she watches him, swinging her foot in time to the music floating out from the cafe where he eats his breakfast every Monday, when he's not picking little girls out from between his teeth. He meant to break her, to destroy her, to kill her. He left her for dead, not knowing that his claws went just deep enough to give her something greater.

She smells the rain before she feels it and she flips up the hood of her red jacket, swinging her foot back and forth while he finishes his tea.

 _I'm coming to get you,_  she thinks, and she smiles with all her teeth.


End file.
